IPad Camera Connection Kit Supports External Hard Drives

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IPad Camera Connection Kit Supports External Hard Drives

Using Apple's Camera Connection Kit, it is possible to hook up a USB hard drive to your iPad and read files. The catch is that you'll need to jailbreak the iPad first.

Maxwell Shay, iPad owner and now iPad hacker, offers a rather involved but straightforward walk-through on his blog. First, you need to use the Spirit jailbreak to open up the iPad and allow third-party apps to be installed. Then you need to grab an application called iFile (available in the Cydia application repository on your jailbroken iPad for $4, with a free trial), along with the "Nano" terminal text editor.

After that, you'll need to be confident of your command line skills, as you'll be using SSH and editing PLIST files. The step-by-step instructions will get you through.

Then you need to hook up the USB drive. The iPad's port will not power it, so you'll need a desktop version with a power adapter, or a Y-cable that will let you plug the drive into the iPAd and a second, powered, USB port (your iPad charger, for example).

Maxwell demoes his hack using the iPad PDF viewer Goodreader, available in the real App Store, but any file-browsing app should see the contents of the drive. From there, you can browse and open files, as well as copy them to the iPad's internal storage. You probably don't want to do this on the go, due to the limitations of plugging the drive into a power source, but if you want to grab a bunch of photos or movies from a friend's home, for example, this hack will let you copy them for take-away.

That overpriced Camera Connection Kit is starting to look a lot more useful. In fact, although Maxwell doesn't try it, this hack should also let you use the SD card reader from the same kit for arbitrary file storage, not just for photos and videos.